Honour for EX-RBS boss is insult to small firms

The decision to knight former RBS boss Fred Goodwin in 2004 made a mockery of the honours system.

He was stripped of the title by the Queen in 2012, joining the late, former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, among the dubious ranks of those relieved of their honours.

However, it should never have taken that long for Goodwin to be humbled. By then, the devastating consequences of his stewardship of RBS were widely accepted.

A forfeiture committee chaired by the head of the civil service at the time, Sir Bob Kerslake, said: “The scale and the severity of the impact of his actions made this an exceptional case.”

It is a little odd then that none of the luminaries on the honours committee thought it might be wise to leave Goodwin’s successor-but-one, Ross Mcewan, out of this year’s nominations.

The New Zealander, who has since retreated to a new job Down Under at National Australia Bank, has been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Although the award was for services to the financial sector, it is not known which “services” exactly.

Mcewan did a decent enough clean-up job during his five-year tenure. The bank returned to profit, the government’s stake was cut to 62pc and some big historical misdemeanours, such as mortgage mis-selling in the US, were resolved.

All perfectly commendable perhaps, but certainly not remarkable enough to make it into the New Year’s Honours list. In Mcewan’s case, “services to the financial sector” seems like another way of saying “running a bank”, which was his job after all. Nor was it one that exactly came with great financial sacrifice, despite Mcewan earning less than the other big bank bosses. He was paid £3.6m in his final year.

Yet, the primary case against Mcewan’s inclusion on the list is his handling of the bank’s disgraceful treatment of small and medium-sized business customers.

Although he was not responsible for the appalling behaviour of the bank’s defunct Global Restructuring Group, its handling of the affair under Mcewan was pretty lousy.

Having hastily claimed that GRG rescued “the vast majority” of firms it worked with, Mcewan was forced into a humiliating about-turn in front of MPS when it emerged that 80pc of small businesses dealt with went bust or remained in a terrible state.

Then Mcewan spent two years resisting publication of the FCA’S report into the scandal, forcing victims to endure an even longer wait for compensation.

RBS eventually escaped punishment because the FCA said it was not guilty of the most serious charge of deliberately tipping companies into default to profit from their demise.

However, the regulator found “widespread inappropriate treatment” and the firm that wrote the report for the FCA said the bank had been obstructive and defensive.

There were few reasons to include Mcewan in this year’s gongs, but plenty of justification for leaving his name out. The year of tech 2019 was the year of the tech stampede. Wall Street investors poured more money into tech stocks this year than in any since the dotcom bubble burst two decades ago.

Stock market listings of technology companies in the US raised more in 2019 than in any year since 2000.

The rush included Uber, Lyft and Pinterest. There has been similar excitement in the UK over stocks that are backed by technology. Shares in transport booking app Trainline jumped 18pc on their first day of public trading, valuing the company at nearly £2bn.

Yet, that was a fairly subdued reaction by comparison. According to research from the University of Florida, tech stocks leapt an average of 31pc on the first day of trading, compared to only 18pc for companies outside of the technology sector.

However, many of the same companies have gone on to suffer disproportionately large share price declines. Uber shares have fallen by a third, while those of Lyft, Pinterest and Slack have all tanked.

As well as raising record amounts, tech companies were the most highly valued since 2001 relative to their revenues. There are fears of a repeat of the dotcom bubble as investors panic that they may miss out on the next sensation.

Yet, the likelihood of uncovering the next Apple or Amazon is extremely low.

‘Mcewan did a decent enough clean-up job during his five-year tenure’